


Blood Runs A River

by CourierNinetyTwo



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 21:13:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11745297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNinetyTwo/pseuds/CourierNinetyTwo
Summary: A Hunter that returned to the waking world seeks a new nightmare.





	Blood Runs A River

**Author's Note:**

> Commissioned by dark-saron. This Hunter has the Noble Scion origin.

She returned to the hunt.

To put it in such a way framed it as a choice, like freedom, rather than an urge to take up blade and pistol once more, something that burrowed inside her skull like a parasite. There was no worth in the waking world when her very veins possessed a constant ache, when every dream was tinged with red that turned to rust, and the constant creeping compulsion to cleave flesh to bone and ensure she didn't bleed clear came with each living breath. She was a Hunter to the rotten core, and with her call came not another dream, but a nightmare.

Yet it brought some relief, in a way. The horror was familiar, the cobblestones ran slick and dark, and the sun never pierced the clouds. In a place of such corruption, killing was more than righteous: it was pure. She wandered from echo to echo, parting curtains of sin and failed ambition to reveal the still-beating hearts underneath, then drove her blade through them. At times, after the fervor of the fight cooled, the Hunter wondered if this was her nature, or simply an obsession that had wormed so deep there was no longer a conceivable difference.

Then she met Lady Maria.

It was a name everyone knew -- whispered and gasped like a prayer by the wretched things left in the research hall of the Church -- and the Hunter could scarcely comprehend what sort of woman could show such mercy and cruelty in equal measure, how the same blade cast down a well could comfortably rest against Maria's lap while she burned the passing hours by in slumber. Perhaps her appearance proved a simple truth: that no amount of kindness could wash the hands of the cursed clean.

With slow steps, the Hunter approached the staid seat, expecting the other woman to wake, but there was not a single stirring breath until she reached for the sword itself. A pale hand snapped tightly around her wrist as Maria's eyes shot open, mouth curving in disdain.

"A corpse should be left..." Curiosity stopped the words short, slender fingers tightening until the Hunter heard bone grind against bone, felt a flutter of pain through withered nerves. "Your flesh is as cold as mine."

"There is only so much heat in the blood can cure." The Hunter replied, not bothering to struggle now that Maria's other hand had stilled atop her sword, thumb stroking familiar circles atop the sheath. "Is there not?"

They were not two of a kind, not quite. For while she had been born in a noble house, the Hunter knew her lineage could not compare to that of a Vileblood, even if Maria had rescinded any claim to royalty and her distant cousin. What they truly had in common was a scar that curved around the throat, although Maria's stopped at a ragged point near the artery, whereas the Hunter wore hers like a noose. She had been beheaded through and through, after all, and in this place it was visible to any who tugged the collar of her coat aside.

Such an act Maria had wrought, hands wrapped around the Hunter's throat as if to strangle her, and for a moment the only scent on the air was crushed lumenflower, light and bitter. When she swallowed, her thready pulse beat against Maria's thumbs, and that vise-like hold did not relax until every inch of that scar had been traversed, memorized like the lines inscribed upon a map.

Of course they could have tried to kill one another. The Hunter knew in her bones that some day the truce would not hold, but for now there was comfort in each other's company, stoppering the gaps of memory from one dream to the next. Maria walked the streets with her to slay the creatures that haunted them, but refused to return to the research hall itself, no matter how many within wailed to hear the sound of their mistress' voice.

"It was a mistake." Maria whispered, one night when she sat with the Hunter and stared out into black water, frigid waves lapping at the shore just shy of their boots. "How does one throw a weapon aside when it exists in your very blood? My skill in slaughter could only come to a malignant end."

Hunters truly had no need for badges, she thought; it was a brand on the soul, leaving both dream and nightmare tainted with its presence. "I was given the chance to walk in the light. Except I could not stand it."

Maria's lips tightened into a thin line. "You felt you did not deserve such mercy?"

"No more than an octopus can crawl along the land." The Hunter replied, a faint smile tugging at the curve of her mouth. "Sure, it can drag itself forward, but the sand rasps and the sun burns. It will die a husk, all because it reached for a world to which it did not belong."

"That it what I touched." Silence stretched between them for a moment before Maria softly clarified, "A world to which I did not belong. She was offended at my impudence, and thus I was consumed. I slaughtered her acolytes, crushed their skulls and wrenched her blessing out of them."

"Kos." Reaching out towards the water, the Hunter touched the slick edge between sea and sand, idly drawing a rune in wet earth before the tide stole it away. "You're talking about Kos."

Maria nodded, eyes never leaving the dark horizon before them. "I was not hunter, but butcher. My prey became the innocent, all of those damned souls who tethered themselves to my tables, endured scalpel and syringe because I promised a cure to their warped nature."

"There is none." The Hunter said softly.

Another nod followed. "None but death, but I cannot even grant them that mercy here, not while the women weep, crying they have failed me. _I_ failed them, and their chorus is one I must bear until time's end."

"They do not weep here." Turning to face Maria, the Hunter dared to cup her cheek and draw those noble eyes to meet her own. "The soul perishes without respite."

Neither one deserved it, but they were hungry creatures, and leapt at the first raw offering. Maria kissed her as if they would both drown from it, tongue and teeth and a bodily shove that pushed the Hunter onto her back before their mouths joined again. It was a claiming mark, and somewhere in the frenzy blood met blood, a gross exchange of nobility that each swallowed down between reddened enamel and wet muscle. The Hunter couldn't taste anything vile at all, only iron and heat, what little they had to share.

It became a pattern, a brutal sort of cycle. Together they would hunt until gore sluiced from their blades and dripped onto the stones below, putting an end to those who shrieked with madness and pain, even if the nature of the nightmare meant the agonized vestiges were condemned to be reborn, again and again. There was no lack of prey, and when such cleansing urges had been slaked, they turned on each other in alleys and shattered houses, pulling out crimson threads from each other's bodies to weave together with kiss and touch, hands finding confidence beneath freshly stained clothes.

"Do you think we are playing into its game?" Maria asked one night, buttoning her shirt with calloused fingers.

The Hunter frowned at the question, choosing to bury her face in a trough of cold water and sputter away the remnants once it washed her clean before answering. "What is the 'it' you speak of?"

A rag was handed to her, although the kindness didn't meet Maria's eyes. "Whatever rules this particular shard of purgatory."

"Must it have one? I presumed a place like this was bound to your past, for it reveals all you have been and could be." Curiosity pricked at the Hunter's heart. "You must have a reason for thinking so."

Maria picked up her coat from the nest of blankets they had used as a bed, one hand plumbing the depths of its pockets before she produced a strange brass dial. The phases of the moon overlaid a clock that was unwound, silent. "Because every time I awake, this is with me, and I lack any memory of its origin or purpose."

The Hunter's fingers twitched. Some visceral urge stirred, telling her to rip the dial right out of Maria's hands, but she swallowed it back like bile. "I don't think the Great Ones would want us like this. What do they understand of affection?"

Maria's eyes narrowed at the last word and the Hunter clarified with a growl, "Or lust. You know what I meant."

No comment came in turn. Such was how they lived, two wolves entwined at the tail, indebted to the bream and salt of the sea. It was a hollow existence in many senses, no one breathed with full lungs in a land of nightmares. The Hunter was scarcely sure how many organs were left within her own body, what had been taken or transformed, and if not for Maria's habit of placing a kiss right over her heart when their limbs lay tangled, it would be easy to believe that she lacked one entirely.

In the nights they returned to the clocktower, Maria never wore her coat, and the Hunter realized she must have been hiding the dial somewhere, ensuring the seal that held their lives together was not shattered out of ignorance or malice. On those moonlit evenings, she let aggression come to the fore, taking Maria on her own chair -- that would-be throne -- until blood soaked the floorboards, scattered upon dried lumenflower petals that were little more than dust and fragrance now. The wounds healed within hours, death's wholeness locking flesh in time like dripping amber.

Pleasure's echo lasted nearly as long, when they managed it.

"What do you think would happen if we killed each other at the same time?" The Hunter asked, watching grey light spun and divided by the clocktower's machinery, massive gears reflected in miniature somewhere out of sight. "I've always wanted to feel your hand seize my heart."

Maria said nothing for a moment, prone from her position on the floor. When she spoke again, her voice was distant, like a speech heard from another room. "I could do that, if you wished."

"But what would _happen_?" Insistence infused the Hunter's voice, curiosity and hunger finding their sharper edges. "Would the nightmare end? Would I be returned to the dream or the waking world?"

"Would you risk being forced back under the sun?" Maria countered, turning on her side so their eyes could meet. "My life ended long ago, good Hunter. If I am shorn from this cursed place, little awaits me but rot. A corpse who could not bear her own failure."

_Good hunter. Brave hunter. Kind hunter._

All things she was not, and never had been.

That was why being returned to the living turned her stomach into a thousand serpent's coils, a hissing, nauseous nest. Was being executed not a penance in itself? If this was the eternity she begged for, burgeoning with sin and sorrow, then it may as well be a heaven. Purgatory was for those who didn't prostrate enough, and there was no greater hell the Church or Great Ones could engineer than a suffering that could not end.

"Forget I said anything." The Hunter laughed, made a jest of it before she shifted onto all fours above Maria, eyes glittering with a predator's intent as she leaned down for a kiss. Strong hands seized her shoulders, forced their mouths to stay together, and the Hunter whispered her desire against cold lips in a hundred eldritch syllables. " _Maria_."

For they were merely rivers of blood rushing towards each other, eager to meet and overflow, to drown the world in red. Nothing more.

\--

 


End file.
